24 April 2011

After a shockingly quiet morning (one of the quietest I have known at this time of year) we retired to view the sewage pond at the back of Houston Audubon's Boy Scout Woods a strategy we use when we cannot find any migrants around the woods. So after a few brief looks at unidentifiable cuckoos rocketing through the trees, we found ourselves overlooking the marsh in the hope of a Purple Gallinule that might take the edge off the pain of not finding many warblers in the woods. The Purple Gallinule duly obliged as it crept around the reedy pool, that held a lone Lesser Yellowlegs shadowing a Solitary Sandpiper sharing the same marshy pond. Then suddenly a Dickcissel dropped down into the grasses beside us saving our morning and giving us an unforgettable moment with this attractive migrant.

The question remains though exactly what is a Dickcissel: a blackbird or a bunting? I'll allow taxonomists to fight it out on that one, although we can enjoy thinking about it all the same.

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WHO is Sam Woods?

A pair of tits (Blue and Great) in a London park 30 years back changed my life; I became a birder, and an obsessive birder by the following weekend. Works like Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book and Richard Millington's A Twitcher's Diary helped in no small part to nurture this in my formative years.
30 years on I am still an avid birder but have also learnt to appreciate other sectors of the natural world, especially frogs and primates in particular, through the undoubted influence of David Attenborough The Great and others. I now work as a full-time professional tour leader for Tropical Birding Tours, and now reside in the Andes of Ecuador. I love my job, sharing birds with people provides every bit of a buzz as a lifebird, which, of course, still creates a wave of excitement every time. I have been lucky enough to see well over 6550 bird species on my travels, which does not make me any more talented than anyone else, just one that is always greedy and impatient for more, which has taken me to all seven continents, and always yearning for that ONE...MORE...B-I-R-D!
I use Swarovski binoculars & scope, & shoot with Canon 7D and Canon 400m f5.6L lens.